Although it's true that managing hundreds of feeds gets to be a pain, for many users, several icons at the bottom of a page just don't represent something easy or understandable. The real challenge for RSS is whether the mainstream users will ever really get the value of subscriptions, and in particular, whether that value will be extremely simple for users to take advantage of (and sure, some of the value comes from having lots of feeds, but for mainstream users my bet is that this will be less of an issue).
Tom Biro saw that we were getting together with the Firefox team to make the icon common, but is wondering when we’ll get together and make subscribing to a feed very simple.
Well, that’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it? Anyway, the IE team is doing a lot of work on user testing trying to get this as simple as absolutely possible.
I’m actually a lot more worried about other things rather than can an average user figure out what subscribing is for. I have no doubt they’ll figure it out. After all, the home page of the BBC now has two RSS icons. Even the EUFA told me they were seeing plenty of usage of its RSS feeds.
Tom Biro wonders when RSS is really gonna get simple?
Originally Posted on 12/18/2005 4:56 PM
by scobleizer
Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger
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